Finally got the Gnome panel to display only two rows of
pixels, on my laptop, when it auto-hides, instead of six.
Using gconf-editor, go to
/apps/panel/profiles/default/toplevels/panel_0
and change auto_hide_size to 2. Voilá! (Somebody
got a leetle beet overzealous about chopping out
config choices!)

The linuxlaptops.com domain now belongs to
Werner Heuser, of Tuxmobil (nee Mobilix) fame, and
no one could be more deserving. I should have handed
it over years ago. (I'm still sorry, Rusty.)

Wrote my first emacs macro, ever, last week. A bit late...
but then, I run emacs in viper-mode.

Saw Down
by Law for the first time in a decade
or two. Tom Waits, John Lurie, and Roberto Benigni in
what might be the world's most perfect film, by Jim Jarmusch.

Evolution crashed "only" once in recent weeks.
I just discovered why I had had so much trouble with
HTML forms in Galeon, lately: somehow my
language-preference had magically switched itself
(I never touched it, I swear!) to "English with Arabic
encoding". That confuses the content-negotiation apparatus
of some web servers, including Speakeasy.net's.

More about what many liberals think about Republicans:
The dupes would like to be toadies, but can't find
anybody to pay them for it. The toadies wish they had
the courage to be crooks. The crooks have nothing
but contempt for the rest. (Disclaimer: I'm not a
liberal, myself.) P.s. to berend:
The "day-by-day" strip has about as much zing as
Mallard Fillmore. You'll find more insight in Garfield.

Evolution crashed for the first time in almost two weeks.
I wasn't using it at the time; it must have crashed when
it was polling imap.

Congratulations to the Galeon team on their 1.3.10 release.
Running it, it works. (Shame on Fedora for dropping it.)
The more Galeon-y and the less Epiphany-y it gets, the better.
On a related matter, gnome-panel has degraded; now it
can no longer be set to hide itself by showing only 1 or 2
rows of pixels (it insists on six rows), and it's
even sloppier than before about noticing when it should
autohide itself in the first place.

rlk: your postings are the most inspiring
I have seen on Advogato in months.

Evolution 1.4.5 with the new Gnome libraries underneath
still hasn't crashed, in more than a week. Now Galeon
1.3.10 is the crashiest program I run. Galeon, I suspect,
has a problem with the downloader corrupting things (i.e.
"Download link"). When it freezes, it seizes the X event
queue, always immediately after clearing space to display
the right-mouse-button-on-a-link menu; I have to kill
from a console. (Ctrl-Alt-F1 still works.)

Terry Pratchett has a new book out, again. It's hard to
keep up, and (contrary to publishing industry norms) the newer ones are better than the old ones. Tom Robbins has, too.
Actually, two, since I had last checked!

Saw Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang for the first time
in decades. Ian Fleming's best work?

Why does nobody involved in designing Mars probes
put a microscope on board, so they can simply look
for microbes? It would be useful for so much else, too,
such as looking at mineral crystallization patterns.

T-shirt: Front, "Don't mind him". Back,
"He's OK."

raph: I'm disappointed that you were
taken in by this econopundit guy and his attack dogs.
Incidentally, he cites Krauthammer claiming that
"Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.". K got it wrong. Liberals
think that (so-called) conservatives are crooks,
toadies, and dupes. (Mostly dupes, of course.)
Republicans can't understand why liberals want to
upset the gravy train. Krugman fascinates them
because he can play every rhetorical trick as well
as they can, and is competent too.

Somebody posted about a patch management tool named
quilt, already pushed off the recent-diary-entries
page. Who was that? (Google is all polluted with some
grotty Java test-coverage thing, although I did find http://graal.ens-lyon.fr/~mquinson/deb.html#quilt.)

Stevey: Go for the money. After you're
well along, start explaining to them how much more valuable
this thing will be to them after they release it under GPL,
'cause it will get new features and bug fixes for free,
and they will have a pool of people to draw upon for
future work who already understand the code (in case
you're engaged with something else by then). There are
plenty of examples of companies who have seen the light
and released finished work. If they don't go for it, so what? You can always write more code. If you feel strongly
enough, treat it as prototyping, and then write better Free
code to compete with it, afterward.

Evolution-1.4.5 hasn't crashed on me in several days.
I suspect it was tickling Gnome-2.2 bugs fixed in 2.4.
The Evolution icon comes off my gnome-panel immediately.
All hail Ximian! All hail Gnome! All hail Galeon!

...you can try to train a dumb boss, says [Scott] Adams.
One worker he knows offered her boss a piece of candy
every time he stopped by her desk and said something
positive. If the boss said something negative, he didn't
get any candy. According to Mr. Adams, the number of
negative comments the boss made plummeted.

I would favor using electric shocks, too. But that's just me.

I installed new Debian GNOME packages today. We'll see how
that affects Evolution's crashiness.

Do British web servers and browsers, and X servers,
and Kerberos peers, exchange magic biscuits?

I see two immediate implications of Bram's Law. First, it means that for things that are,
nominally, easy, most likely somebody has implemented
it right, and probably lots of people. The problem is just
finding the good implementations, and calling attention to
them. If the HTTP service that comes with Python stinks,
the one in Twisted is probably good. (Disclaimer: This
is hearsay, I haven't looked at either.) The community
is pretty good at recognizing its best and brightest, and
making it easy to find out what they think, so if the
competent among us help by keeping lists of competently
done alternatives to popular but badly-done code, those
among us equipped to tell the difference will use the good
stuff. The good stuff might get less community
participation, but maybe it doesn't need it so badly,
given that it's (nominally) easy. In the extreme case,
we can each implement and maintain our own versions of
such code. Probably we do already, but who likes extrema?
Let's each post a Bram's Law List of obscure but
competently-constructed alternatives to badly-done but
popular components, and let Google collate them for us.

The second, perhaps subtler, implication is that the law
might be the first sound engineering reason for making
(what might otherwise be) a simple standard complicated.
If it's really hard to get something essential to a standard
right, then there will be less temptation to re-implement
it badly. The danger, of course, is that the bozos will
just dispense with the hard bit. MySQL was built without the essential transaction engine, and became
wildly popular. (Of course the soundness of this reason depends on the idea in my previous paragraph failing.)

Evolution 1.4.5 still crashes almost every day.
I've never had Mutt crash, not even once. Evo, Galeon,
and XFree86 are the only programs I (still) use that
ever crash.

I just
did something fun with high voltage. It involved
two metal mixing bowls, aluminum foil, thread, a metal bottle cap, and a TV. Drape foil across the top of the
TV and covering half the screen, and put one of the bowls
on it. Put the other bowl near it on another scrap of
foil, not touching.
Hang the metal bottle cap from a thread between the bowls.
Attach the scrap of foil under the second bowl to a wire
to a good ground, such as the third prong of an outlet,
or a water pipe.

When you turn on the TV, it sends a nice static charge
into the foil on the screen, and the bowl on it. The
bottle cap swings over and gathers charge, and then
swings to the other and dumps it into that side, and
swings back again, ringing like a gong. This is called
"Franklin's Bells", and is perhaps the first electric
motor. He attached his to a lightning rod instead of
his TV, and used it to detect incipient lightning.
For more fun, see
scitoys.com, e.g.
this one.

That guy who plays Morpheus in the Matrix movies
may have had the best role of his career as Cowboy Curtis
in Peewee Herman's "Peewee's Playhouse" series, now
available on video.

Bram: Why start by turning all this great
high-grade energy into heat? Photons are about as
clean an energy source as ever there was, albeit oscillating
three or four orders of magnitude faster than we can quite
manage to rectify efficiently yet. Lightning is already
electricity! You need extreme temperatures to get any
respectable efficiency from a heat engine, and all a heat
engine does is turn dirty heat into clean motion.
The problem with lightning is that it releases an extreme
energy burst (1.21 gW? :-) in a millisecond, but you
usually need smaller amounts of power over a longer period.
Therefore, what you need is really a storage system
that can absorb a huge amount of energy in an instant,
and then feed it (all of it!) back slowly.
Run the lightning through a coil to generate a magnetic
field, and use the field to loft a heavy object that
releases gravitational potential energy as it descends.

mrd: I can't imagine you neglected to
put a "$" at the end of your regular expression to anchor
it to the end of the file name...

I've been running Evolution 1.4.5 for over 24 hours, and it
hasn't crashed yet. I'm removing its icon from my GNOME panel
now, in hopes that I won't be needing to restart it any more.

Does anybody know why jimw's diary entries
are being filtered out? This is they guy I mentioned last
week as originator, in 1992, of the expression "Sooner if
you help" as applied to Free Software releases.
I had no idea he was here. If you can do anything to raise
his diary rating, please do.